About me

Director of Investing & Behavior Finance

I’m currently Director of Behavioral Finance and Investing at Betterment, where I integrate behavioral finance and passive investment management to help customers achieve their goals. Betterment is the most behaviorally informed investing platform available – everything from our interface to our portfolios are intelligently designed to make good behavior automatic, and bad behavior difficult. As a result, Betterment’s customers have the lowest behavior gap I know of – i.e. they don’t reduce their returns because of trading.

At Betterment, I:

Use knowledge from behavioral finance to develop and improve our advice, tools, and investment process

Provide educational resources on investing and optimal behavior

Collaborate with leading researchers in behavioral finance and economics to learn what works for our clients, and validating our unique

For the six years prior to joining Betterment I was a Behavioral Finance Specialist at Barclays Wealth and Investment Management for the Americas. The team specialized in developing and implementing commercial applications of behavioral finance, decision making, and behavioral economics.

I cemented his interest in how people make decisions through a BA (Distinction) in Economics from Boston University and a MSc in Decision Science from the London School of Economics. Between earning degrees I was a health economics researcher at the University of Pennsylvania and worked at Chiliogon, a private equity firm.

Since joining Betterment in January 2013, I have continued to integrate academic and commercial interests by running controlled experiments to prove behavioral interventions are useful. Highlights of current work include experimental research into how to prevent harmful market timing behavior, and how to increase savings behavior by making advice more affectively powerful.

I am a regular presenter at academic and industry conferences, and a guest lecturer at Columbia, NYU, LSE, LBS, and UCL, and UCLA.